EVENTS

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Tuber.”

The many frivolities of Mr. Potato Head I had borne as a child, but when he deigned to return to taunt me with his removable and interchangeable facial features in my adult years, what sane man would not be driven to a kind of madness at such a brazen defiance of nature as his?

I was first drawn to his hideous ears. Ears?! Can one rightly call such nubs of pink plastic ears? Formed they were in the shape of an ear, but hear they did not, as was proved after many unsatisfied attempts at gaining the devil’s attention with a great many shouts and cries. Ha! What a fool he was, standing there atop his unmoving feet. And yet I felt that perhaps I was the fool, with his silence taunting me, for what other reason did he have to ignore even my wildest pleas of surcease?!

But it was his horrible nose that filled me top full with such terrors as I have never experienced before. Mad?! Mad, you think me? Yes, perhaps so. But if I am mad, look you upon that mister’s nose (if “mister” is even a title befitting such an aberration), lacking all olfactory sensation, and ask yourself if you would remain steadfast against utter despair at seeing it upon his face!

Clever? Yes, I was exceedingly clever. I came from behind. The fool! He never even turned around. Had he done so, all would have been lost. But closer and closer I stole, until at last I was upon him. I stood over him, suddenly overcome with dread. He could sense me! He would be my ruin! Every square inch of his tawny flesh attested to my terrible deed! I lunged at his face and, overcome by what demon even I cannot say, detached his revolting features one by one.

Do you wonder what I did then, when I held the hellish face all apiece in my hands? Wonder not, for what could any man do but straight away open the latch at the back of the wretch’s body and place his face directly in his backside! Ha! Now he would feel the shame with which he filled me—if shame could be removed from one’s face and placed in one’s rear end.

And there he sits still, faceless yet eternally staring into my soul, the exposed holes on his body where his face had been forever reminding me of my ungodly deed. Do you yet wonder at my tale?! Here! Here he is, and here, out from his backside, is his hideous nose!